A Wonderful Mystery and My Last Blog Post

Today was a day of wonderful serendipity, of make-it-happen pixie dust.
It didn't start out that way. It started out with me feeling defeated. I finished my 60 days of trying to get my body in shape and have been in the midst of meddling, trying to help get the other stuff, gear and tech etc. to make the John Muir Trail project happen the way I picture it in my mind.
There have been obstacles (there always are). It was looking like there would be no pictures sent from the trail. We couldn't get the right equipment.
And then. Oh who knows exactly what happened? I think it helped that an executive in the company that owns my newspaper heard about the project and he backpacks and he loves the John Muir Trail and he thought it was a great idea.
(The funny thing is that the executive happened to have a conversation about the JMT story because of a story I wrote about nuns...nuns who's special calling is praying for mass media journalists!)
We're set now. We'll have the technical equipment we need. We will be blogging and sending photos from the trail.
I'd talked to my friend Michael Mayhew in the morning while I was still stymied, feeling like possibilities were slipping through my fingers faster than silly string. He's a film editor and television writer, so sometimes when working at a newspaper starts feeling Byzantine I call him. He works in Hollywood. He's got me beat.
When everything did the complete U-turn, I called him back with the happy news.
He said it's like that scene in the movie "Shakespeare in Love". The theater owner Mr. Henslowe (Geoffrey Rush) is explaining how putting on a play works. He says the natural condition is "One of insurmountable obstacles on the road to imminent disaster."
But that it always turns out well in the end.
They ask him how. And he says:
"I don't know. It's a mystery. "

It's such a beautiful mystery.

This is my last blog here.
The show is about to begin.
The other writers and I will be blogging at www.fresnobeehive.com/jmt Our John Muir project site launches Aug. 6.
And I start hiking the John Muir Trail on Aug 8...

Game on. Wish me luck.
d.

Finally, a short entry

I have been going to yoga class -lots and lots of yoga classes - to get ready to hike the JMT.

Today, I found out that Marek, the experienced wilderness guy, has been running aroung his neighborhood with a backpack full of rocks.

Yoga. Stone-laden runs.

Pretty much says it all.

The Proving Grounds Prove Unsettling (Or, I am SO screwed.) Part II

Note: I learned something about blogging. You can't walk away from an unfinished post to go get something to eat or you might then get sleepy and go to bed and then be running late the next day for your vacation of backpacking-kayaking-camping- and not see a computer for a week. But, I'm back, and at a keyboard. So...

When last we left off Shellee, Rich and I were starting the climb to the peak of San Jacinto. We'd left home in a rush. I was wearing shorts and a strappy tank. Supply-wise we had some water, Shellee's never-used space blanket, and a few walnuts. Experienced hikers call these kinds of people idiots.

Getting off the tram cars you walk down a steep cement path that leads you into the San Jacinto Wilderness at 8,400 elevation. We were on our way to the 10,800 foot peak. It's 11 miles round-trip. The sidewalk was covered with dirt and rocks, obvious remnants of a storm from the night before. It was gray out and strangely humid.

"I don't care if it rains," says Shellee.

"Bring it on," she says, using a phrase she detests. "I would actually welcome being wet."

This is what Palm Springs summers do to a person. Rich, equally deranged by too many days of 112 plus, was quite in agreement with her.

I, on the other hand ,was reviewing all the reading I've been doing lately about lightening strikes, and body temperatures and other such wilderness hazards.

I do not wish to give you false foreshadowing. So, I'll tell you right now, by some fluke it did not storm on us.

But, the point is, that it sure as heck looked like it was going to, so I did not protest the 100-yard dash pace that we quickly set. Nothing like running straight up a granite cliff. But I figured it was important for us to get to the top and quickly back down before being caught in the thunderstorm the other two were ready to welcome.

We stormed past the Japanese tourists in their spanking new hiking clothes. Two small women were hunched over like the letter c carrying huge packs on their backs. I briefly noted, while stomping - no time to stop and contemplate them -that they looked mighty uncomfortable. Miserable in fact. And they were only going a hop and skip to Long Valley. I was about to traverse the Sierra with a backpack.

We ran into a couple coming down from the top and I stopped to ask them about the previous night's storm. They said there had been lightening strikes and ground-shaking thunder. The rangers had got everyone down off the peak and piled them all into the small shelter. Many people had just been wearing cotton shorts and tank tops, they mentioned without making it seem like a direct commentary on our clothing, and they had all huddled in there shivering for hours. We wished them a good day and continued our trek to that same peak in our cotton clothes.

The scenery was stark. Yes, the trees were towering. But this is a mountain that raises straight from the desert floor. It's trees are whipped with furious winds and storms and lately bark beetles. So their branches are all stubby and twisted like their suffering from some terrible neurological disorder. There are almost as many tall ghostly white trees laying on the ground as reaching the sky.

"The cycle of life," says Shellee,

"A tree cemetery ," I say.

Finally we are through the evil woods and moving into bushy hedges and we come out on the side of the mountain where there would indeed be breathtaking vistas if I could look about, but we're moving fast and I have to watch where I'm putting my feet. So for over an hour while coming around the side of a 10,800 foot peak what I see is about two feet of dirt like a horse with blinders. Every once in a while, I stop to breathe and look but always within seconds is the sound of other hikers coming up behind me. It's a very crowded trail.

Also, there is Shellee ahead of me. We are the dearest and most competitive of friends. We first met years ago when an editor at a paper I'd just started working at told me I was his next best writer to Shellee Nunley. I went out of that office annoyed, thinking, "Ok, so just who is this Shellee chic?" I went to find out. We started talking and we've been seeing who can run faster, jump highest and write the better transition ever since. We knocked it off for a little while, a few years back, after we almost drowned our friend Larry. (We got in a kayak race, when we were just supposed to be toodling Larry, who swims in the manner of a wind-up toy - lots of flapping about , no forward motion - around a bay. Someone went faster and then someone else went a little faster and next thing you know we were racing off into the ocean until I looked back and saw Lar's capsized boat. His hat floating ominously on the water. It is an infamous day he has lived to make sure we never forget.

However, on San Jacinto, Larry was not with us as reminder of the evils of competition, and the thought of Shellee making it up that mountain before me was not to be tolerated .(Rich I don't compete with. He's too much bigger than me.) But about a mile from the top, for the first time in my adult life I just didn't care if Shellee got there without me. I was at this point just so disgusted with the whole trudge trudge trudge, puff, puff, puff thing.

"You just go right on ahead and trot up that mountain Missy, " I thought and slowed my gate. And caught my breath immediately. At which point I had a terrible thought.

What if I am in shape and this is just how exertion feels? I mean what if this is as good as it gets? It's not like I was collapsing or anything. I just didn't like breathing heavy and having my muscles strain. So I trudge and puff and strain and occasionally glance at dead trees and get to the little shack a good five minutes after my friends. I am feeling very cross. But then I remember there's a peak sign-in book in that shack. Oh-ho-ho.. There's a reason I'm a writer. And a few yards in front of me is paper and a pen.

I go in there and flip through all the "Awesome Views! Our second trip to the top!Margarite and Hans" and innumerable "We made it's" with little annoying smiley faces, and add my own commentary:

"Ok all you John Muir types. What exactly is so wonderful about some clumps of granite and a few trees with cerebral palsy? Look out. Look down below at that green in the distance. Down there are restaurants and mister systems and margaritas and people conversing instead of puffing in hermithood . .." I go on for a bit, amusing my cranky soul greatly, and sign it "Not John Muir's Type."

I come out of the shack with a smile on my face, to the disappointment of Shellee and Rich who had plotted to launch into an angelic rendition of Valerie Valerah in counterpoint to my scowl.

They sang anyway. I had to laugh. They sounded like the Whos in Whoville. I thought everything was going to be ok. But then I remembered. There's this thing that apparently all human beings have except me, where it is not ok to sit and enjoy a 357 degree view. Oh no, you have to precariously crawl over boulders up to the tip tip top, risking your life so you can have a 360-degree view and take a snapshot with the peak sign.

So we do. And at one point I slip, and end up with one foot on one boulder and the other foot on another with about a 15 foot drop between them. And my vertigo which makes me feel like I'm going to tumble 10,800 feet setting in. There's a church group up there with about 14 members of all shapes and sizes cheerily leaping from rock to rock, as I stand heart-thumpingly paralyzed.

Finally, we head down. And for some reason I keep stumbling and kicking rocks. Probably because I am busy talking, theorizing that maybe I'm just descended from a line of people who preferred the seashore. That perhaps I'm genetically disinclined to mountains. I am amusing myself. But I complain about repeatedly almost breaking my toes, and ask Rich and Shellee to watch me and see if I'm walking wrong or something. But Rich says, "You know what's causing you to trip? And makes his hand do that universal sign for gabbing too much. Where you make your fingers and thumb come together quick like a mouth running on.

Now I'm mad, because apparently, it's not enough to just trudge along looking at two feet of dirt. Oh no, one must also do it in silence. He thinks it's funny that I'm peeved and starts singing Valerie Valerah, which is either an 18th century hiking song or something an MGM musician wrote for a Heidi movie. I hang back. Only to be accosted by the church group behind me singing church songs. I cross the side of the mountain silently sandwiched between Jesus tunes and Whoville. Argh.

When we get to the winding part of the trail I pass everyone. I've always liked to run on the parts they tell you not to run on. So I'm hopping from rock to rock, feeling all fleet, and I figure "Ha Ha!. I've finally left them in the dust and if I want to stop and look around and actually enjoy myself I can. " I'm by a meadow and it's almost dusk. So I walk to the edge,crouch down and quietly wait to see what shows up for a dinner of grass. Shellee and Rich are on my heels not three minutes later. I don't see a thing. So I get up and start moving just as Shellee says "Oh did you see that deer?"

As far as I know it was the only creature any of us saw all day. We didn't even see a squirrel. I have more wildlife in my urban backyard. With every step on San Jacinto I am dreading the JMT more and more. Thinking how this one day's misery will be multiplied times eight on my trip. At one point I look so miserable Rich hugs me and says "Don't be scared. You'll be fine." An then I am once again secretly annoyed at him, for 1. talking to me like I'm a 3-year-old and 2. being right, because now I am scared.

Finally, we are down the mountain. When Shelle crows that we made it to the peak in 4 hours I just want to hit her. And me. That's not even admirable. That's just insane.

But then we go to the Blue Coyote, the wonderful PS restaurant know for it's Wild Coyote margaritas. They are dangerous. And by my second one I have moved on to Big Drunken Worries. It is hitting me that I must be souless. I climbed to a peak. I looked out. I felt nothing. I only thought the trees were looking pretty peaked. While others had gloried and basked in grandeur and splendor I had wondered what in the hell we were thinking. I had spent the day with two of my oldest, dearest friends and wished I could wrap tape around their valerie-valerahing lips. Not a drip of spirituality to me, I moaned.

"Oh no Deed, You're spiritual," says Shellee, ever faithful.

"Yes, yes, " says Rich valiantly. "You are."

I'm not," I protest. "I am unmoved by grandeur and beauty (although it sounded more like Imaun ma-moo be granzhur and beateee") Name one thing I get spiritually moved over."

There is silence.

Then Shellee, who has already a couple of times that evening declared herself "drunkasaskunk" says "Flowers!"

I am filled with glee and agreement.

"You're right! I love flowers (or I luuuv Fwowers!)" I say, greatly relieved to have found a form of redemption.

So, after training for weeks, I hit the proving ground and find the only thing I have going for me going into the JMT is ...

I love flowers.

The Proving Grounds Prove Unsettling (Or, I am SO screwed.)

I am so screwed. So-so-s0-so-screwed.

To review: four reporters are hiking different sections of the famed John Muir Trail. It was my idea and sincere belief that it would give structure and color to the story to see the trail from different points of view and aptitude.
So, there's the longtime backpacker who's feeling a changing season of life and wants to go to the backcountry where he always finds clarity; a spiritual young woman who in the past hiked the trail while overcoming an addiction and will be returning to a place that makes her contemplate the divine; the hardcore John-Muir-Trail-Pshaw-To-Me-It's-An-Overcrowded-Highway-Give-Me-A-Beef-Stick-And-A-Real-Trail guy; and me, the first-timer.

I thought there was some schtick involved in being the newcomer. I mean, me? backpack? Ha-ha. And so forth.
But here's where the funhouse mirrors have turned me all around. Because even though I did have a certain amount of genuine dread and anxiety (especially compared to my cohorts who are floating through air dreaming of weighing the ounces of their dry goods and fleeing civilization). I also thought my discomfiture was a great setup for a story. I may have even been playing it up a bit (deep down figuring, hey, maybe I haven't backpacked, but I've biked California, I've put my hand in a whale's mouth in a hard-to-reach Mexican cove, I've ridden on a cattle round up, so there!)
I mean you could already see where this one was heading (I thought). I'd grump and growl and fret and start stomping up that mountain only to find Well, By Golly! I had it in me after all! And oh the epiphanies that nature brings. My singing soul. (And so forth and so on.) Right? Right? Haven't we all seen this story a trillion times before?

Except:

No schtick. No shit.

I am in deep trouble.

As I found out this weekend when I hiked to the peak of San Jacinto.

It begins...well, where does it begin? Probably on Sunday driving into Pam Springs. I always look forward to going through the pass between San Jacinto and San Gorgonio the two highest peaks in Southern California. They are sentinels at the mouth of the Coachella Valley. There's a draft between them that powers a Hollands-worth of windmills and blows LA's smog back in it's face. Sometimes there is even an actual line of demarcation in the sky above the pass, one side Inland Empire gray-guck, the other, brilliant desert blue. But, when I drove into the desert on Sunday, San Jacinto was wrapped in ominous black. I looked at the peak, or where I would have seen the peak if a thunderhead wasn't draped over it. I knew there were people up there, and I could almost feel the thunder and see the cracks of lightening. Down below it was 118 degrees. Sometimes the desert just doesn't work at being a people-pleaser.

My friends Shellee and Rich told me that all day the sky had been blue and there had been just a tiny puff of cloud hanging around the top of the peak. Then out of nowhere, the black. To hear them tell it this storm had come up as suddenly as the one in the opening credits of H.R. Puff N Stuff. A real Witchy-Poo concoction.

The next day it's very humid out and the mountain is softwashed in a haze, but no thunderhead. We leave all in a flurry, because we had to go now-now-now-or-we'd-miss the first car up the tram. I did not have the presence of mind to ask why we had to make the very first car or remember my long-sleeved capilene shirt or much of anything else in all the rush.

At the tram I find out that if you miss the 10:00 tram, you take the 10:10. The 10:10! (As I will repeat loudly and drunkenly later that night).

(To be continued, after I go rustle up something to eat)

John Muir Does Palm Springs?

I am on vacation.
Sort of.
I mean I'm officially on vacation, little v's lining a week full of days across my name.
But I'm not quite free yet. Plans aren't quite in motion. I randomly grabbed this week because summer vacation time in the newsroom was disappearing fast, and I have since been piece-mealing plans for it.
Next weekend Christina is coming out from Texas and we're going kayaking at Point Reyes with a group from the yoga studio. Cathy and I are going backpacking overnite on Wednesday but we haven't decided where yet and my backpack and tent are still not in.
That leaves from now until Tuesday open. I'm Free! ( love that word, that concept, that expansive feeling.)
But here, I sit on a Saturday morning of my first day of vacation quite terribly bogged down.
My house is once again threatening anarchy. As a child my parents were amazed at how fast I could make a mess. As an adult I still carry this unrivaled talent. Just one or two days of "I don't care" and I can make my living space look like the opening scene of a movie where a home has been badly ransacked. If I'm ever kidnapped and the police say there are signs of a struggle , don't believe them. I may have just been looking for my shoes.
And I am a staunch minimalist. Not every one can even make a mess who owns nary a knickknack.
So there's that. I am craving order and fresh flowers on the table and maybe an afternoon matinee.
On the other hand, I could throw Mac in the Rav and be laying on the beach reading a novel by lunchtime if I left right now. (well, after Mac was too exhausted to chase a stick anymore and would leave me in peace to read a novel while he rolled around in the sand)
Except. I'm supposed to be hiking and reading about hiking and searching hiking websites for hiking clothes made of capilene. (Which is this soft stretchy oddly striped material they make pants and hoodies and everything else out of. I'd explain it's sweat-wicking marvels but it would take too many paragraphs. When you buy backpacking clothes they have spec boxes that look like all the gibberish on those papers you see in new car windows. They hammer you with numbers. ounces. degrees . whatnot. I think it's just to lull you into a dull state so you won't react too much when you get to the price and find long underwear will cost you $42. And so it won't hit you that you are now shopping for clothes based on the criteria of their sweat-wicking!
The list and cost of getting-ready-for John Muir Trail goes on about as long as the 219-mile trail itself for someone like me who has no equipment and hasn't done anything like this before.
There's also talk of me driving down to Palm Springs this evening and climbing to the peak of Mt. San Jacinto with Shellee and Rich tomorrow. Mt. San Jacinto is that majestic mountain that stands at the entrance of the Coachella Valley protecting it from smog, and wind, and all manner of ills. I used to see that mountain everyday from my living room window. To the Cahuilla Indians, San Jacinto is sacred. I'm right there with them . I have always loved that peak. Driving on the I-10 on a 4th of July weekend might be foolhardy. But it would be great fun and great training.(bagging the peak that is, not the interstate)
And Shellee has sent me an email saying she came across this interesting journal entry by John Muir:

"In all my travels through the California wilderness -- past the granite majesties of Yosemite, below the Giant Sequoias of the Sierras, and along the redwood slopes of Big Sur -- I have found no journey more satisfying than the trek up Mount San Jacinto above the Coachella Valley. It is nature's gift for all who have concocted a ludicrous hiking adventure as a get-famous-quick gimmick, and the completion of it will release any fool from paralyzing fright." That John! Love....


Later: Saturday night

A plan has been hatched.
A thunderstorm expected to hit San Jacinto on Monday has been pushed to Tuesday.
So I had today to recoup and do exotic things like buy a new dishpan. Will be driving tomorrow. And Shell and Rich and I will climb my favorite mountain Monday.

Beachwalk Guy and a Pair of Thongs

This weekend I went to Mt. Tam in Marin with three of my oldest friends. (By oldest I mean longest time. Everyone is still spry enough to climb a mountain.)
As old friends do, we recalled other conversations and adventures.
Like the time Rich and Shellee went hiking in Palm Springs. I'd just moved away and I was the friend in common, so even though they'd known each other a long time they hadn't spent much time together without mutual friend here to translate.
Shellee said she'd been having knee problems. She suspected it was from wearing thongs. She spoke to her chiropractor about it:
"Wow," says Rich. "You have really personal conversations with your chiropractor."
Which causes Shellee to regard him oddly.
She tells him that her chiropractor felt she was right.
"My chiropractor tells ALL his patients not to wear thongs," she says. "They can cause permanent damage."
"But I don't understand!" says Rich" How do thongs hurt your knees?"
Shellee hunches over, demonstrating a little shuffling crab walk.
"Well, " she says "It's like you have to lean forward and squeeze just to keep them on."
Rich sits down on a rock and loudly repeats "You have to lean forward and squeeze?!"
Shellee can't figure out why he is so incredulous over a conversation about her chiropractor.
"Yes"she says, "And besides they hurt your toes."
This is the point at which Rich figures out that what are flip-flops to San-Diego grown him, are thongs to Pacific Northwest Shellee.
She's talking footwear. He's thinking underwear.
The retelling of this story gets us to thinking about Beachwalk-Guy (To me thongs/flipflops are beachwalks. )
We muse upon just where on the John Muir Trail I will have my Beachwalk-Guy-Moment.
This is when you've done some feat. You've set out and conquered a physical landscape that you thought was beyond your capabilities. And just as you come around the bend, or atop the peak or into that distant cove, knowing, absolutely knowing that you undeniably rock, that you - brave, fit physical specimen - have triumphed over inhospitable terrain and the limits of human strength, well that's when you run into Beachwalk Guy who got there before you.
Of course he's wearing thongs/flipflops/beachwalks.
He has a pot-belly.
And he's smoking...
While he whistles.
Well, to be fair, it's not always Beachwalk Guy. Sometimes it's being on the last step of Mist Falls Trail and realizing that clicking behind you is the cane of a kind looking, elderly man. Holding onto his elbow is his elderly, plump wife in her flower-printed shapeless dress.They have obviously come straight from morning mass and decided to hobble up the little garden path by that pretty waterfall, the same route that just a few seconds ago was your butt-kicking climb straight up a granite wall. (This really happened to me.)
Or after three hours of puffing and striding you get to the crest of a Washingtonian peak only to hear the woman behind you, the woman who is helping her toddler over the last boulder by patting his Huggies-clad behind. (This really happened to Shellee.)
Should we even talk about the places we've seen strollers? STROLLERS. How tough can you feel when you're joined by a pram?
So the betting is on. Here's a link to a fairly detailed map of the wild, rugged terrain we're about to traverse. http://www.jmt2k.com/map/jmt.html
What will it be? A skinny guy smoking a Camel, wearing his made-for-sand-and-swigging-a-Corona rubber souls, passing me at Donahue Pass? The Red Hat Ladies catching up to me at Rush Creek Forks? A woman with 3- month-old twins (or merely 8-months pregnant with number two) pulling her toddler's wagon across Shadow Creekfootbridge?
Whatever the details may be, where will I have my Beachwalk Guy moment? .

The Summer Solstice

My night tonite might not seem to have a lot to do with hiking the John Muir Trail.
But it does in a round-about, wait-until-the-sage-smoke-clears sort of way which is this:
I'd been thinking about my "true" reason for the trek.
Not the surface reason, which was basically that my scheme to move to an island some 900 miles off the coast of Portugal and hang out with dark-eyed men with names such as Teofilu and write a heart-warming and comical book that would lead to me being heralded as the next Peter Mayle, was not -- to my great and genuine surprise--coming together, at least not this summer. So I decided to throw in with my co-worker Mark Grossi (www.make-mine-muir.blogspot.com) and make the John Muir Trail project a reality. I felt the need to help make some dream come true, even if it was someone else's.
But, once it was all in motion, I was looking for some philosophical reason for my part of the trek. My personal story arc.
I'd been playing around with an idea based on something that Catherine Campbell , a local activist attorney, once told me. She said she divided people into two categories: game and not game.
Maybe my personal reason to climb four mountains and go without a shower for over a week and carry all my worldly comforts on my back like a nomadic camel with paniers, would be to make sure I fell into the game category. Open to life .Up for adventure. And so forth and so on.
Into this frame of mind, came my phone conversation with my new friend Alice, which went something along the lines of:
Alice:I want you to come to a women's only summer solstice party with me.
Diana:Why in the world would I want to do that?
Alice: Don't you just want to be game for anything?
I didn't look at the email with the details until about an hour before I left work today. It was at this point I found I was supposed to bring a flower for the communal bouquet, something personal to place on the "centering" table, and a ritual to share. Also, a summer salad or a dessert. Dairy ok. No meat as it was a vegetarian house. Not just the occupant apparently, but the entire building. There would be an hour of eating and chatting before we formed a circle to begin our rituals.
At this point I frantically began dialing Alice's number, determined to suggest we catch a movie instead. She didn't answer, the schemer. There was nothing to be done but decorate a Trader Joe's cheesecake with apricot jam and tropical fruit in the shape of a sun and be game for anything.
The eating and chatting were nice and good for me, as many of the women gathered were academics and discussing things like the third-wave of feminism as opposed to second-wave post-feminism, thereby making me feel intellectual by association. (Except the whole time that I was learning that it is folly to blindly accept the celebrity-driven drivel of Alice Walker's daughter Rebecca who holds the new feminism is only for minorities, I was quite confused because I'd mixed up Alice Walker, the black author, with Alice Waters, of Chez Panisse fame and I was silently trying to figure out why the daughter of a white, organic chef was now the controversial voice of minority feminism. ) Anyway. On to the rituals. First, we all got smoked with sage. I thought of Angie Osborne, a local native American who practices the old ways while fighting strip mining. I wondered what she would think of a group of middle-class women standing in a Fresno backyard with their arms outspread like gingerbread men as someone traced their outline then made a circle and a cross in front of their face with a sage stogie. Whatever. I'm game for anything! (And, besides I was hoping the sage would drive the biting mosquitoes away.)
Then we all faced north, a direction the the hostess told us represented among other things, the emu.
We faced east, south and west with their accompanying color schemes, sceneries, animals and vegetation. Along the way participants could call those not there into the circle.
We were soon joined in spirit by great grandmothers. Sisters. Someone who's name sounded like Moobeydegoosh. Then Al Gore, all the displaced of Katrina, the victims of the Iraq war, and the whales -whom the caller said would be safe within our circle.
I formed a mental picture of this disparate array of spirits. And added the emu for good measure.
Next, a flower-holding ritual got my attention. Women put their hope into a flower, then told what it was they were hoping for as they looked at the little dried bloom in their hands. It was like getting to hear everybody's birthday wish out loud. One woman wanted to live through her visit with her conservative mother-in-law. Another wanted a hot, young date to take to her daughter's wedding and make her ex-husband eat his heart out. I was becoming entertained. But then one woman wished for world peace. And the next added social justice. And then everyone nodded somberly and agreed there was much work to be done(apparently beyond holding flowers). Alas, there went my voyeuristic fun. Because who's going to go back to sniping about relatives or wishing for a hunk after someone's raised the ante to World Peace and Social Justice?
Now, I'm home after having faced the four directions, getting my spirit cleansed with sage and accidentally hitting a little gong-type bowl too hard when it was my turn, hurting my ears, and probably alarming neighbors. (Small children are probably right now having bad ninja dreams with mysterious ringing bringing out the warriors of the night.)
And on this magical, mystical summer solstice, I have brought home a philosophical conundrum to ponder along my many, many steps on the JMT.
Where's the line between "game for anything" and "too thine own self be true."?
I mean at what point do you get to say say "Thanks, but, Nah, I'd rather catch a movie than acknowledge my open heart to the universe," OR "Wilderness? Sure! But let's hike to a nice lodge with feather beds. I really don't need to camp for eight days..."